‘Has she ever said so?’
‘No. She hasn’t exactly said so. But we all know how she feels. When people question her about your absence she tries to cover up by telling them that you’re still recovering from your illness.’
‘I’m not a religious man, Ratan. Pujas and yagnas make me uncomfortable. Is it not better for me to stay away in the circumstances?’
Ratan would agree with a nod of his head.
One day, Ratan came with the news that Kushari moshai and his wife had moved into Nyaya Ratna’s house in order to look after the mistress’ comfort. He then proceeded to describe how the elderly matron had clasped Binu to her bosom and wept as if her heart would break; how Sunanda had washed her sister-in-law’s feet and wiped away her tears and then fed her with her own hands, how Kushari moshai had cried like a child and everybody had wept in sympathy.
‘I have a feeling the two families will come together now,’ Ratan prophesied. ‘And the credit for it goes to Ma.’
Knowing Sunanda, as I did, I did not share Ratan’s optimism. But a great deal of my gloom was blown away. I realized that Rajlakshmi had planned this moment and worked for it all these months. My heart sang with happiness! I welcomed the thought that by today’s sunset the third day would be over. Tomorrow Rajlakshmi would be home!
But she did not come. Around noon Ratan arrived with the message that his mistress had left for Bakreshwar—a place of pilgrimage near Gangamati—and would not come home for another week. Another week! I had looked forward to seeing her and I was disappointed but strangely, neither hurt nor angry. I understood that all her rituals, prayers and pilgrimages were part of a passionate endeavour to wipe out the past. Pyari was dead but her memory lay like a weary load on Rajlakshmi’s heart, afflicting and tormenting her beyond endurance. Hence this frantic beating of wings against the bars of her present existence, this desperate struggle to escape into the world beyond. And the terrible irony of it was that I, whom she loved, was the principal bar. It was my presence that disrupted her flight, dashing her back to the floor of her cage, over and over again. ‘Shall I, whom nothing and no one could bind, stand in the way of Rajlakshmi’s happiness and ultimate welfare?’ I asked myself. ‘No,’ I resolved. ‘I’ll set her free, not like the last time out of anger and jealousy, but out of love and pity for her suffering.’
I remembered the afternoon when I was leaving Patna. Rajlakshmi had stood motionless, on an upper veranda, watching me step into the carriage. Her lips had not spoken but the desperate cry of her heart, tortured with the pain of parting, had filled my ears all the way home. Not heeding it I went away to distant Burma. But I couldn’t escape that passionate appeal—formless and soundless though it was. It had floated over land masses and oceans as effortlessly as a ghost and, reaching me, had pierced me where it hurt most. The scene of our second parting was being set, even now. She would watch me go away, mute and still as an image of stone. But would her heart cry out to me as it had done the time before? I thought not.
I woke up the next morning with a curious feeling of displacement. I felt an alien, an intruder in the house and in the village. Even the fields and the canal seemed remote and unreal. An overwhelming desire to get up and walk away across the fields and over the bridge to where the sky was huge and soft with morning light took hold of me but, overcome with lassitude, I lay awake listening to the noises of the household. Kushari moshai arrived with our rations of milk, vegetables and fish and departed shortly afterwards. The cook hummed a little tune as he chopped vegetables and washed rice. And then Ratan came to wake me up. He said that his mistress had made him promise that I would be looked after exactly as I was in her presence. I was to be served my morning meal by eleven o’clock and my evening meal by eight. The servants were to get a month’s extra salary if her instructions were carried out to the letter.
I rose and had a bath and meal, not wishing my apathy to stand in the way of Ratan’s gain. Then, exhausted with the effort, I sank into a heavy slumber. When I awoke it was past four o’clock. I had a cup of tea and prepared to go out for a walk. I had barely stepped out of the door when a stranger came up to me with a letter in his hand. It was from Satish Bhardwaj. He was very ill and wanted my presence at his side as soon as possible
‘What is he suffering from?’ I asked the messenger.
‘Cholera.’
‘Let’s go,’ I said instantly, glad to escape the pressures of my immediate environment for the time being.
Dusk was falling by the time I reached the construction site which was six miles away from Gangamati. I had formed all sorts of ideas about the status and comfort enjoyed by that exalted being, sub-overseer, S. C. Bhardwaj. What I saw did not make me lament my own fate. A plump Bauri woman was cooking something over a wood fire in a corner of a shed. She rose as I entered and led me to a tattered tent on the floor of which, on some equally tattered and soiled sheets, lay the sick man.
Frog was, by now, in a state of coma. There was a Punjabi doctor with him who rose to leave the moment he heard I was the patient’s childhood friend. His trolley was ready, he said, and he couldn’t delay leaving any longer. As it was he would not reach headquarters before midnight. I must hasten to add that he wasn’t callous or heartless for, before he left, he gave me some medicines together with innumerable instructions on their use. He even told me to keep an eye on the rest of the camp for, cholera being extremely contagious, the coolies might get affected at any moment. Then, warning me not to drink any water from the quarry, he departed.
I stood, dazed, watching him mount the bony back of his dispirited nag and ride away. I realized that I’d just landed myself in a mess. And it wasn’t for the first time either. Rajlakshmi had come into my life in a similar situation and so had Abhaya. Sighing in self-pity I turned to the Bauri woman, Kalidasi, who, as I guessed rightly, was Frog’s mistress. ‘Is there no better bedding to be found in the camp, Kali?’ I asked.
Frog’s beloved shrugged and pushed out her lower lip.
‘Could you get me some straw?’
‘Straw?’ she giggled. Rows of white teeth flashed in a shiny black face. ‘Do we keep cows here?’ Then, leaning over her protector, she asked, a practical note creeping into her voice, ‘Will he live—do you think?’
‘This is true love,’ I thought. Aloud I said, ‘These sheets are filthy. Doesn’t Babu have a dhoti I can spread under him?’
She shook her head. Then, rummaging in a bundle, she brought out a pair of torn trousers. ‘Pantaloon?’ she asked brightly. But I shook my head. Pantaloons, though European articles of clothing and highly valued by natives, cannot, unfortunately, be used in lieu of sheets. Suddenly I remembered seeing a piece of canvas lying outside the tent. I dragged it in and, spreading it against one wall, lifted Frog’s inert body onto it with Kali’s help. Then, seating myself on a packing case, I prepared to keep a vigil. Kali finished her meal and, curling up in a corner, proceeded to snore so violently that the flimsy walls of canvas shook to the ground.
Around midnight, Frog’s limbs started stiffening with cramp. I shook Kalidasi awake. ‘Get up and light a fire. We must warm Babu’s feet and hands or he will die.’
‘Where’s the wood?’ Kali asked briefly before turning over to a more comfortable position. Within a few minutes she was snoring as energetically as ever. I walked over to the shed that was Kali’s kitchen and found that she hadn’t lied. There was nothing fit to burn except the shed itself and, unwilling to consign my friend’s living body to the flames, I decided not to take the risk. I set fire, instead, to the packing case on which I had been sitting. Taking off my shirt I rolled it into a ball and, warming it at the fire, began fomenting the patient’s limbs.
Around three o’clock a couple of men, carrying a lantern, called loudly at the door of the tent, ‘Doctor Babu! Doctor Babu!’ I came out to be informed that my presence was urgently required as two in the coolie camp had been taken violently ill. Taking the doctor’s medicines with me, I followed
my guides across a barren tract of land to where a line of trucks stood silhouetted against a steel grey sky. My surprise knew no bounds when I was told that my patients lay in the trucks for, as I learned later, the trucks served as conveyers of stones and earth during the day and coolie quarters at night. I climbed the bamboo ladder that led to the floor of the first truck and flashed the lantern in the face of the sick man. I saw that he was very old and on the verge of death.
‘Where is the other one?’ I asked.
‘There!’ A crowd of frightened faces pointed to a truck at the far end of the line. This time it was a young woman in her twenties. There were two children sleeping by her. I was informed by the other occupants of the truck that she had been abandoned by her husband a year ago. He had fallen prey to the recruiters and gone off to work in a tea garden of Assam in the company of a younger woman. Sadly, apart from vivid descriptions of her brute of a husband, I got nothing out of the sick woman’s neighbours. Not one of them came forward to help me treat her or take care of the children.
By morning, another, a young boy, was smitten. And Frog’s condition grew steadily worse. I sent a message to the Punjabi doctor at Sainthia but the messenger returned with the depressing news that the doctor was on a visit and could not come. Two days and three nights I spent on the trucks. Not a wink of sleep did I get during that period nor anything to eat, for I had no money. What was worse, not a drop of water passed through my lips, for, drinking the quarry water had been forbidden and there was no other source. Added to all this was a sense of agonizing defeat. Despite all my efforts I couldn’t save one life—not even Frog’s.
I buried Frog’s body (there was no money for a cremation) on the third day and returned to the trucks. I could do nothing much but I couldn’t abandon them either. There was a young boy who kept crying for water but no one agreed to walk down to the village well and fetch it. The coolies continued to drink the quarry water despite my repeated appeals. They would risk death but would not undertake any work that did not yield hard cash. Besides, who had the time? Those who were still fit went back to their digging for the prospect of a weekly wage was dearer to them than the lives of their fellows. The railway line was a government project and could hardly be abandoned because cholera had broken out in the coolie camp. I noticed a kind of callousness among the workers that I’ve never seen in a village. With all its feuds and tensions, a village has a composite inner life that binds its member with invisible threads. In a labour camp, where people, uprooted from their natural habitat, are massed together with only one common interest—that of making a living—no links, either of love or hate, are formed. The civilized élite knows this and since its financial expansion depends on its capacity to dehumanize a man and get an animal’s work out of him, it has resorted to this trick from time immemorial.
Every evening the workers returned drunk on toddy. Every night there was singing and dancing and unabashed love-making in the open trucks. Life and death went hand in hand. Even as the ground was being dug for corpses, the wails of newborn infants rent the sky. Sickened by the tumultuous, teeming life around me I sat, a little apart, watching over a sick mother and child. The boy opened his eyes and, passing a stiff tongue over cracked lips, murmured, ‘Water.’
‘There’s no water, son.’
He nodded weakly and shut his eyes. My eyes burned and bitterness welled up in my heart. It wasn’t only the indifference to another’s pain that tortured me. It was the meek acceptance of one’s own. This wasn’t self-control. This was a state of insensate inertia—subhuman, bestial.
Above my head, the stars and constellations hung like golden lamps out of a blue-black sky of incredible beauty. At my feet lay the dying. Suddenly a red-hot rage swept over me, stiffening my spine and misting my eyes with flecks of blood. ‘Die,’ I muttered between clenched teeth. ‘Spawn of vermin, die! But curse your oppressors! Curse them with your dying breath—you who bear the burden of the civilized world on your backs! Drag it down, down to the bottommost layer of human history though your bones and sinews be ground in the process.’
Twelve
THE BOY DIED THE NEXT MORNING AND TWO OTHERS WERE afflicted. I handed out medicines and sent another message to Sainthia. Then, crossing the field, I stepped on to the path where, just ahead of me, two elderly gentlemen dawdled along holding umbrellas over their heads.
‘Is there a village nearby?’ I asked.
‘There!’ one of the men pointed a finger.
‘Can I buy something to eat?’
‘Why not? Rice, dal, ghee, vegetables—whatever you wish.’
The other turned to me and fired a volley of questions with the aim of ascertaining my caste, parentage and business in the locality. I tried to satisfy his curiosity as best as I could but the moment I mentioned the name of Satish Bharadwaj, the two old men spluttered in rage, ‘Cheat! Drunkard! Scoundrel!’ Expletive after expletive was hurled at the unfortunate Frog.
‘All railway employees are like that—thieves and rascals!’
‘I’m afraid he has gone to a place where your abuses can’t reach him,’ I said, pointing to the mound under which the dead man lay.
This shocked them into silence. At last one of them said in a voice that shook, ‘He was a Brahmin.’
‘I know, but there was no money to buy wood.’
‘You could have come to us,’ the other said, his face red and swollen. ‘To bury a Brahmin—’
‘Are you a relative?’ the first asked curiously.
I heard later that he was the headmaster of the village school. I told them who I was and how I came to be there and how I hadn’t eaten anything for three days. The old men clicked their tongues in sympathy. ‘Come home with me,’ the headmaster said. ‘You need a bath and a good meal. It is extremely dangerous to starve when surrounded by cholera patients.’
I was dying of hunger and thirst and needed no second invitation. Agreeing instantly, I began to follow them to the village.
‘I don’t blame Satish Bharadwaj,’ the headmaster said as we walked along. ‘Everyone who works for the British is corrupt. Such is the contagion they spread among us.’ And, with this introduction, he proceeded to elaborate on the politics of British rule. ‘Look around you, young man,’ he said ponderously. ‘We have no tanks, no wells, no ponds—no proper sources of water. People die like dogs in the summer heat. Our villages are infested with malaria. Cholera claims the lives of a third of the villagers every year. But does the government do anything about it? No. Instead, it spends lakhs of rupees on another railway line. There was no railroad in my childhood. How cheap things were then! How plentiful! Whatever grew in the village—mangoes, jackfruit, rose-apples—everyone got a share. Now, thanks to the railway line, even the greens that grow in one’s backyard are sold in the city for a few coins. It is shameful the way men, women, even children are caught by the lure of money.’
I had my own reservations about the railway. I had not a doubt that this immense network with its insidious links was responsible for the disappearance of food from Indian villages. Rice, lentils, vegetables—the staple food of the people and that which sustained life—were being bartered for worthless luxuries imported from abroad. And how many of us enjoyed them? There had always been a gap between the rich and the poor in India, but now it was no longer a gap. It had assumed the dimensions of a vast abyss. Yet I argued for the sake of argument, ‘Is there anything wrong in converting excess food into money?’
‘Yes, there is,’ came the ready answer. ‘That is a Western concept not born out of the soil of India. There is no such thing as excess where food is in question. Is it enough only to fill our own stomachs? Do we have no duty towards our fellowmen? Do we have to emulate our conquerors and snatch the food out of the mouths of the weak and afflicted?’
‘I agree with you up to a point. But I don’t go the whole way. Charity ennobles the giver but degrades the taker. Why shouldn’t every man work for his own living? Besides the British pay for what t
hey buy. We needn’t sell if we don’t wish to.’
The old gentleman got terribly excited. He jumped up and down on his little feet, ‘You talk like an Englishman. Put a hand on your heart and ask yourself which is better—to barter the produce of the country and fatten your bank balance or to feed your starving brothers? In the pre-rail days there were some idlers and wastrels in every village of Bengal. They had to be looked after and someone or the other did so, grumble and curse though he may. Yet they were an integral part of the community. They were the chief entertainers at weddings and celebrations and chief pall bearers at funerals. They ran errands and sat up nights in sickness and death. Today, thanks to the rail and the pressures of civilized living, that breed is extinct. But are we better off without them? Have they not taken away with them much of the joy of living?’
I must confess that his words startled me. In appearance he was an elderly semi-literate rustic of the kind commonly found in Bengal’s villages. But what he was saying went beyond him somehow. I said, hesitating a little, ‘I’d like to ask you a question if I may. Are these ideas your own? That is, are they born of your own experience?’
‘They are Swamiji’s,’ he answered without a trace of embarrassment. ‘Swamiji never lies.’
‘Who is Swamiji.’
‘Swami Bajrananda. Young as he is, he is a great scholar and—’
‘Bajrananda!’ I cried. ‘Do you know him?’
‘Know him?’ the headmaster, whose name was Jadav Chakravarty as I later found out, said with a curious mixture of pride and humility. ‘He resides in my house as Krishna did in the house of Vidhur. He came among us a couple of months ago. He started the school in which I teach. And he doctors the sick—’
This was the same Ananda who had walked in our company from Sainthia station to Gangamati. How Rajlakshmi had wept when he went away! How she had pleaded with him to come back to her! But, true sanyasi that he was, there was no room in Ananda’s heart for a woman’s tears. He was living within a few miles of Gangamati but had never thought of visiting her. ‘When my time comes to leave her, as it will very soon, can I find the same detachment?’ I asked myself. ‘No, never,’ came the reply. ‘You are too weak, too abject in your love.’
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